First Solar

This is a report out by first solar and what is interesting is that while using a glass substrate, they have still been able to drive the cost per watt down to an impressive $1.08 per watt. They also understand what the objective is.

In the meantime the CIGS technology is allowing the actual printing of solar cells and surely promises to bring this cost point much lower. I am expecting pennies per watt before this is much further down the road.

The real tough act to follow will be Nanosolar’s. A two million dollar tool that cranks out the capacity of a nuclear power plant each and every year at an opening selling price of $1.00 per watt leaves nothing to the imagination. The treat to First Solar is so real and immediate that this report serves only as an attempt to placate the backers who surely are getting nervous reading Nanosolar’s pronouncements.

The CIGS print protocol has been rushed to market upon it been just good enough and certainly cheap enough. On going refinement will surely double efficiency at the least and likely halve the selling price. This will even be fairly quick, well inside the design lifetime of the solar cells.

That means that if you build an application, you can expect and plan to change out your cells in perhaps three years for twice the power while saving some money.




First Solar Creates Tough Act to Follow

Solar startups will have trouble replicating the thin-film solar panel market leader's performance in today's poor economy, industry watchers at a Photon International conference warn.

by: Jeff St. John
December 2, 2008

Companies seeking to take First Solar's place at the top of the thin-film solar panel market won't have an easy time of it – even if investors are hungry to find such a contender.

"Searching for the ‘Second Solar'," – the title that Photon International gave to the opening day of its three-day solar industry conference in San Francisco – made that point neatly enough.

After all, you can't have a "second solar" without a First Solar (NSDQ: FSLR) to compete against. The Phoenix, Ariz.-based maker of cadmium-telluride panels has driven its production costs to as low as $1.08 per watt in the third quarter of 2008, down from $1.18 in the previous quarter and $1.23 in 2007 (see First Solar Profits Up 54%, Credit Crunch Could Impact Biz).

Getting to those low costs has been the result of more than 20 years of "hard work," as well as the alignment of First Solar's expansion at a time when solar power was receiving significant support from both governments and investors, Bruce Sohn, First Solar's president, told the conference audience Tuesday.

While many other solar panel startups are now aiming at costs of $1 per watt, "It's clearly not obvious who's going to do that, and how it's going to happen," Sohn said.

Thin-film companies including Solyndra, Nanosolar, Miasolé and HelioVolt, which make copper-indium-gallium-diselenide films, also known as CIGS, have raised a lot of money as they've set their sights on competing with First Solar (see Competition for First Solar?). So have giants like Honda and Shell.

Potentially, CIGS panels can harvest more electricity from the sun than cad tel panels. Experimental CIGS panels at NREL hit 19.9 percent efficiency while the best cal tel cells peak at around 16.5 percent efficiency.

Many also say that putting CIGS thin-film solar cells on thin substrates, like metal foils, is easier. First Solar puts its solar cells on glass, expensive to buy and heavy to ship, although it is trying to develop thin substrates.

And there are now new cad tel solar cells coming to market, such as AVA Solar, which just raised over $100 million in VC funds.

But given today's poor economic climate – and the growing maturity of First Solar's relentlessly efficient manufacturing, represented by the company's $6.3 billion current backlog of sales – startups will have a hard time trying to match First Solar's recipe in the short term, said Jeffrey Grabow, with Ernst & Young's high technology practice in San Jose.

After years of growing venture capital investment in solar companies, 2008 will probably see investments fall, Grabow said. In the short term, it's likely venture capitalists will focus on getting later-stage companies to profit-making production, rather than funding earlier-stage companies seeking to prove new technologies, he said.

"Since the end of September, times have changed," he said. "Venture capitalists are spending a lot of time rationalizing their own portfolios," seeking to separate those companies with short-term paths to profitability from those that won't survive, he said.

"Cleantech and solar have been bright spots, and I think they'll continue to get the lion's share of dollars in the near term," he said. "But I think a lot of that will be going to later-stage deals, because that's where they have to go."

The larger outfits like Honda won't have to worry about VC funding, but even these companies are having a rough ride. Shares of solar companies have fallen harder and faster than the Dow Industrial Average in the past two months, he said, and "This is going to affect anyone in the solar industry who's looking for capital or financing," Grabow said. (See Stocks Stumble After SunPower Lowers Forecast.)

Michael Ware, a managing director at Good Energies, a venture capital firm focused on greentech investments, said solar startups shouldn't "oversell themselves" when considering how to bring new technologies to market. Nor should they expect to go public with the expectation that they will match First Solar's market performance (see First Solar Shares Jump 24.5%).

"There's a long road to go from a startup to where First Solar is," he said. "To calculate your valuation based on where First Solar is, we think is a mistake."

While Good Energies will continue to look for investments in solar companies, "The new investments we're going to make are going to be very selective," he said.

Still, Grabow said, companies that do have technologies – and plans to bring them to commercialization

– that could match First Solar should relentlessly network to get the attention of venture capitalists.

After all, "They're afraid they missed First Solar, and they're afraid they're going to miss ‘second solar," he said.

Nanosolar Ships First Megawatt

A short note here catches us up on the activities of Nanosolar. While I do not understand the media silence on this major story, I do notice that plenty of folks are awake and tracking this story. Of course my readers have followed me with several stories that have steadily broken into the mainstream.

These suckers are about to be installed on a serious facility and will be beyond question or dispute. I suspect that we will see an IPO in the spring. Why lose any of this news?

Flexible solar cells!

Posted on November 22nd, 2008 by Phalgun Shenoy

It is heard that Nanosolar has started shipping its flexible thin-film solar cells, meeting its own deadline and marking a milestone for alternative solar-cell materials, that the first megawatt of its solar panels will be used as part of a power plant in eastern Germany! The company has developed a process to print solar cells made out of copper indium gallium selenide, a combination of elements believed to be an alternative to silicon. Owing to the high price of silicon, most companies are making thin film cells from copper indium gallium selenide, but it is stated that many have run into technical problems.

Solar energy would be significantly cheaper than fossil fuel and this is said to be attributable to the manufacturing process the company has developed and that eventually the company would be able to deliver solar electricity for less than a dollar per watt !

CIGS Solar Cells Efficiency Rises

This is an informative bit of commentary that confirms my surmise that the labs are rushing into production on the basis of producing ten percent efficiency. That is the bare minimum for the beginning of application work.

Nanosolar is not planning limited quantities and they just announced that they have achieved operational breakeven on their present sales. Normally, I am skeptical of early days pronouncements about sales and earnings, but this company is clearly running hard to become the front runner and actually expect that their advisors would insist that they under promise and over produce.

It is also clear that their press coverage is nicely expanding and I have seen no challenges to date. But then their backers are intimidating. Obviously an early IPO is in the works for this company.

The more important point is that 20 percent efficiency is a done deal which makes it directly competitive the best silica and the theoretical thirty percent target is becoming very real.

Other lab work is also opening up exploitation of the full visible spectrum and also the infrared spectrum, allowing much more energy to be converted.

Nanosolar has clearly broken the cost barrier of $1.00 per watt or less. Now we need to maximize efficiencies to maximize the ease of application.

Amazingly, this is still all happening offstage from the mainstream media. Yet in 1970, I explained to my cousin that we would have a machine on a desk inside of a decade and that communication between machines would come shortly after. I then suggested that all human knowledge would become machine based and accessible in the nineties. And this would generate an explosion of knowledge and innovation. I merely failed to imagine that anyone would care besides us academic types.

We are about to be swamped with local cheap energy and the nice problem of finding ways to use it. We can now proceed by actually terraforming the Earth and turning most of it into a well managed garden.

Michael Kanellos

Rumor: New Record in CIGS Efficiency October 23, 2008 at 9:34 AM

The National Renewable Energy Labs (NREL) has upped the bar in copper indium gallium selenide (CIGS) solar cells once again, sources tell me. NREL scientists have developed a CIGS cell with 20.2 percent efficiency, inching past the 19.9 percent cell the lab announced in March. I’ve called NREL but haven’t heard word back on confirmation.

That number helps explain why VCs and investment banks continue to pour money into CIGS. Potentially, CIGS cells have the ability to convert more sunlight into power than other thin-film technologies like cadmium telluride and amorphous silicon. Cadmium telluride solar cells have a theoretical maximum of around 19.6 percent and commercial cad tel cells have an efficiency of around 10 percent. (We said nine earlier.) CIGS can also be printed, say advocates, on cheap, flexible substrates that can be integrated into building products. Cad tel solar cells, to date, need a glass substrate, which limits cad tel to rooftop applications.

CIGS cells are being produced in limited quantities around the 10 percent efficiency mark and theoretically CIGS cells could get into the mid-20 percentile or even low-30 percentile range someday.

Some of the leading CIGS companies include: Nanosolar, Solyndra, SoloPower, HelioVolt and Miasole. There are newcomers too: Telio Solar and NuvoSun.

Still, the stakes are high. Nearly a billion dollars have been invested in CIGS startups in the past couple of years and most of them have yet to start commercial production. Many companies have had to delay their CIGS solar cells due to manufacturing issues. (Chemically, the elements don’t play well together either — it’s the solar equivalent of trying to pull off a Guns N’ Roses reunion.) Even the large companies doing CIGS and CIS cells like Honda haven’t exactly been cranking these things out of the factory.